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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From Edward Rutherfurd, the grand master of the historical novel, comes a dazzling epic about the magnificent city of Paris. Moving back and forth in time, the story unfolds through intimate and thrilling tales of self-discovery, divided loyalty, and long-kept secrets. As various characters come of age, seek their fortunes, and fall in and out of love, the novel follows nobles who claim descent from the hero of the celebrated poem The Song of Roland; a humble family that embodies the ideals of the French Revolution; a pair of brothers from the slums behind Montmartre, one of whom works on the Eiffel Tower as the other joins the underworld near the Moulin Rouge; and merchants who lose everything during the reign of Louis XV, rise again in the age of Napoleon, and help establish Paris as the great center of art and culture that it is today. With Rutherfurd�s unrivaled blend of impeccable research and narrative verve, this bold novel brings the sights, scents, and tastes of the City of Light to brilliant life. Praise for Paris �A tour de force . . . [Edward Rutherfurd�s] most romantic and richly detailed work of fiction yet.��Bookreporter �Fantastic . . . as grand and engrossing as Paris itself.��Historical Novels Review �This saga is filled with historical detail and a huge cast of characters, fictional and real, spanning generations and centuries. But Paris, with its art, architecture, culture and couture, is the undisputed main character.��Fort Worth Star-Telegram �Both Paris, the venerable City of Light, and Rutherfurd, the undisputed master of the multigenerational historical saga, shine in this sumptuous urban epic.��Booklist �There is suspense, intrigue and romance around every corner.��Asbury Park Press.… (more)
User reviews
The historical novel is written so that the history of Paris seems almost secondary to the stories of the characters. Yet, the history is nicely detailed and the reader feels the atmosphere of the city through the activities of the interesting characters regardless of the century. The novel is quite lengthy (over 800 pages) and it took me a month to read it. But, I greatly enjoyed the fictional and actual accounts of Paris events and people and highly recommend the novel.
Rutherfurd has
In this book, the families are the highborn de Cygnes; the Le Sourds, pitted against the de Cygnes again and again throughout the ages; the laborer/artisan Gascons; the commerce-minded Blanchards; the Jewish Jacobs. For some reason not clear to me, Rutherfurd has chosen to skip around in time, rather than follow a chronological order. Not only do you jump from one set of characters to another from chapter to chapter, you may jump forward or backward in time.
This jumping around makes it difficult to develop the characters. Just as you're starting to get a picture of one set of characters, the chapter ends. I suppose that's the tradeoff for a novel that spans centuries and that focuses on the history of the place. The place becomes the protagonist and all the humans become side characters. Well, OK, if that's the deal, then I can accept it if I love the treatment of the protagonist. But I can't say that I did. Paris did not come alive for me in this book.
The sweeping sociopolitical events and movements in French/Parisian history are handled in very broad strokes and in a labored and pedantic way. You get a clue as to the style right from the get-go, when the history of the Paris Commune is given to us by way of a turgid monologue delivered by a mother to her son. I know this background has to be provided somehow, but the way this read, I could imagine Rutherfurd's early draft saying "[insert history here]." I couldn't help but compare it to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, where there is also a lot of historical information that is told by way of conversations, or one character telling another the history. I had just been listening to the audiobook and a character, Jack Shaftoe, tells his horse (really) some fairly lengthy history and it was both entertaining and educational; a huge contrast to this book.
Interspersed with the broad-brush historical descriptions, Rutherfurd focuses in on some selected events in a more personal way. One of these is his focus on the building of the Eiffel Tower, and Thomas Gascon's work on both it and the Statue of Liberty that M. Eiffel designed and Parisians built as a gift to the United States. This was probably the most dynamic and lively part of the book, and Thomas Gascon the most dimensional character.
Unfortunately, that only tends to emphasize how paper-thin the characterization is in nearly all the other cases. People behave in ways that Rutherfurd lays no foundation for; presumably it's just convenient for his plot. The characters seem like dolls that Rutherfurd uses to act out his stories, not like real people. I just didn't care about any of them. That became painfully clear in the middle of the book, when there is a long chapter about a love/social position triangle. I wasn't invested in the characters, because they hadn't been brought to life. The same is true for almost the entire 20th century, when Rutherfurd inexplicably plunges the story into a ridiculous soap opera, complete with love triangles, an adoptee searching for her birth family, sexual intrigue and so on.
What's more, most of this could have been placed almost anywhere. Paris is just window dressing. When a character goes to work as a model for Coco Chanel, we read virtually nothing about her work or Chanel. In other words, our protagonist, the city of Paris, is depicted as superficially as the human characters. An exception to this is when we arrive at World War II. Suddenly, the story becomes very Parisian and far less superficial. It's a shame the reader has to wait until the last 100 pages of the book for this transformation.
It's disappointing that Rutherfurd managed to write such a lackluster book about one of the world's most fascinating cities. I would have given the book 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 stars, but because the World War II story was good, I'm rounding up to three stars.
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book.
Just as he did with Sarum, London, Dublin and New York, in Paris Rutherfurd seeks to give a broad historical overview of the City of Lights. Unfortunately, I felt this to be one of his weaker efforts. Other reviewers have noted the irregular, non-linear method used by the author in Paris. While I have no problem with different story threads, in different time frames, I see no rhyme nor reason in the way the author skips forward and back. For example, he begins a story in 1883 Paris, switches back to 13th century Paris for a short chapter, then returns to 1887 Paris. Nothing that happened in the 13th century story had any bearing or relation to the characters or families in the 19th century story. Jumping back and forth simply acts to make the reader lose touch and familiarity with the characters in the various vignettes.
In addition, while the author seeks to “hit all the high spots” in Parisian history, in doing so he gives short shrift to several of the defining moments in not just Parisian or French, but world history. The French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon are given only the briefest attention. In effect, about 90% of the novel occupies the time frame of 1885-1965. In my opinion, the novel is poorly organized and even worse, fails to accurately tell the story of the city of Paris.
My wife and I went to Paris about a year and a half ago. It was my first trip to Europe, so I was excited to learn more about the city I had visited. The novel did not disappoint. During our trip my favorite section of Paris was Montmartre, the mountain where the Sacré-Cœur Basilica is located. In Rutherfurd's book a working class family named Gascon lives there. We get to follow Thomas's work on the Statue of Liberty and also on the Eiffel Tower and then we get to follow his brother Luc's less than reputable life.
This is historical fiction, so some of the characters are based on the lives of real people while others are created for the story. The kings were interesting, or course, but I really enjoyed Thomas' relationship with Monsieur Eiffel and the discussions they had about the engineering of the tower. Also, Montmartre is interesting in ways I didn't realize when we visited it. The mountain consists primarily of gypsum, from which plaster can be made (plaster of Paris). Gypsum is a soft material and is valuable enough to motivate the creation of numerous mines. For these reasons the mountain wasn't the best place to build a huge cathedral. The builders had to establish a foundation by digging a number of giant shafts and filling them with concrete. As a result the comment was made that Montmartre isn't holding up the church. It's the church that's holding up Montmartre.
I enjoyed learning about the history of the Louvre and Versailles, but what was more fascinating to me was the history of bigotry in the city. Antisemitism was prevalent in Paris through the centuries and there were other forms of bigotry as well. The hatred between Protestants and Catholics created a great amount of violence and death. France is a Catholic country. The Inquisition went on within its boundaries for centuries. Rutherfurd does an excellent job of showing his readers the results of this political decision on individuals. And he shows antisemitism through the lives of the Jacob family. Sometimes the bigotries are subtle and sometimes they are massive.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I didn't think this novel was put together as well as Rutherfurd's New York, but it's still a five star book.
Steve Lindahl - author of White Horse Regressions and Motherless Soul
Essentially, for me, the tale introduced and largely followed these families: the Gascons, the Le Sourds, the Le Cynges and the Blanchards. The historic rise of Paris, from decadence to the modern cultural center it has become today, is told over more than 800 pages. I listened to the audio, and if truth be told, it is a perfect cure for insomnia. I fell asleep several times as I listened. It just got too tedious after awhile. It took fully one third of the book before all of the characters and their connection to each other became clear enough for me to completely follow the thread of the story. Perhaps it should have been a series of books, each featuring a century or so, rather than one book trying to cover it all. It often felt like a subject was incomplete, possibly needed more detail, while others rambled on excessively. Of course, I did have to keep reminding myself that it was not history, but rather historic fiction. I just felt that the tapestry of the narrative was not knitted together as coherently as it could have been.
However, all of the important moments of Paris history are covered, even though the fictional story sometimes overpowered the reality. We learn of the courtesans, the brothels, the monarchies, the influence of the church, the Protestant massacre, the storming of the Bastille, the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the building of Notre Dame, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley’s visit to Paris, Jean D’Arc, Richelieu, Robespierre, Monet and Chagall, Hugo and Zola, Hitler, Anti-Semitism, the Vel d’Hiv roundup, Viet Nam, Napoleon and Josephine, the aristocracy and the hoi polloi, the socialists and the communists, Hemingway, Ben Franklin, Lindbergh, Picasso, the Dreyfus affair, Luther Calvin, Rodin, Versailles, the Bois de Boulogne, The French Resistance, etc. I could go on and on. There were so many people and events covered, one can understand why the tale became overwhelming at times. Then, to make it more confusing, the author jumped from century to century, back and forth, without warning, as well. For me, the most interesting part of the book was the story elaborating the French resistance during WWII.
On the whole, I think the author simply tried to weave too many pieces of the city’s background together, without really developing all that many of them. Except for the building of the Eiffel Tower which introduced the reader to many of the characters, and the details surrounding the events leading up to and including both World Wars, the book sometimes felt sketchy. I felt almost as if the author had prepared a list of events he wished to include and then constructed a narrative around them, perhaps less concerned with the accurate history than the creation of the tale needed to introduce it.
The international scene emerged on the Paris stage and Paris grew into an international, cultural center for musicians, artists and writers. Anyone who was anyone wanted to be there, if not for the ambience, then for the decadence. For every loose women and unscrupulous man there was a brilliant author, artist, musician and thinker waiting in the wings. Innovation had its birthplace. Over the five centuries featured, culture, technology, politics, finance and industry, advanced at breakneck speed. Rodin’s “Thinker” embodied the mood in Paris.
It is said if we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it, and it would seem with current events today, in 2014, we have learned very little. There is still distrust and strife, hunger and poverty around the world, and warfare is everywhere one looks. Will there ever be peace?
Overall, as much as I enjoyed my read of Sarum many, many moons ago, I found Paris to be a story that left me with just an “meh” feeling. Maybe my tastes have changed. I still have [London] waiting for me on my TBR pile so I will give Rutherfurd another chance, but not right away. I can only recommend Paris to readers that may have an interest in the building of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty or a Parisian point of view of the two world wars.
The members of these families are interwoven throughout the story but as time changes their positions change What once was unheard of becomes the normal and those who were once enemies fight side by side. The story takes the families through the French Revolution, WWI and WWII as well as the cultural development of the city.
Absolutely loved this book and although there were occasional coincidences which stretch belief, overall it was so believable and intriguing. Famous people such as DeGaulle, Hemingway, and Picasso sometimes as background and sometimes as real people.
Background provided for the Eiffel tower, the revolution and other iconic points of reference, norms of the day and interesting characters,